


enough

by ilia



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Loathing and love and Ferdinand is sunlight, M/M, Paralysis, Physical Disability, Written for Hubert Week 2020 day 3: Reason / Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:06:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26857162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilia/pseuds/ilia
Summary: Experiments with Reason leave Hubert's hands scarred and ruinous.-Ferdinand is a beast unruffled by Hubert’s curtness. He pulls himself up to sit. Even in the room’s little light, Hubert can make out the curtain of curls that tumbles down that sculpted form.His adonis, Hubert might breathe, were he feeling more pliant that morning. His joy. Were he up to it he would allow Ferdinand’s words play a brief respite to his doubts, climb back in between the bedsheets and let his partner work away his tension as they have become so expert at in the lucky months in which they have slept in one another’s arms.But the morning has dawned frigid, and so is he.
Relationships: Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 11
Kudos: 123





	enough

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Hubert Week 2020 day 3: Reason / Scars.
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3

When he dreams, he dreams of tall, dry grasses along the pads of his fingers, of soft flesh and the sure weight of a bloodied sword. And when Hubert awakens, it is to be smothered by the harrowing sensation of loss all over again.

He pulls himself from the enclave of blankets that swathe the nudity of his body at night. His feet fall onto the hardwood floor beneath him. His hands, limp and useless, lay on his lap.

Atop the milky flesh of his thighs they appear especially lifeless; blackened, accursed things with thick scars ascending crooked fingers and the range of motion of an elderly man undergoing the frigid curse of time. Even as Hubert looks at them they ache underneath him, for no reason at all, barring perhaps the way they twitched in his dream with pitiful longing.

And after such a dream, he knows he will sleep no longer. Hubert stands, and makes to pull on the day’s garments. With grunts of pain, he is able to do up the buttons, oil slick hair cascading into his eyes as he scrutinizes each and every loop and wrestles them into submission. His sleeves come on awkwardly; the buckle of his belt, with a mountain of effort. Finally, bleach white gloves slide onto his bony fingers.

They clasp taut around the wrists. They hide the ugly flesh from exposure.

“Hubert.”

The voice of his lover is the only thing, Hubert thinks sometimes, that could give him such pause. He glances towards the head of orange at the bed’s far side.

“ _ What _ .”

Ferdinand is a beast unruffled by Hubert’s curtness. He pulls himself up to sit. Even in the room’s little light, Hubert can make out the curtain of curls that tumbles down that sculpted form.

His adonis, Hubert might breathe, were he feeling more _pliant_ that morning. His joy. Were he up to it he would allow Ferdinand’s words play a brief respite to his doubts, climb back in between the bedsheets and let his partner work away his tension as they have become so expert at in the lucky months in which they have slept in one another’s arms. 

But the morning has dawned frigid, and so is he.

“Won’t you come back to bed?” Ferdinand asks gently, beautiful face creasing in concern. “Hubert, my stars. Did you have a bad dream?”

Icy eyes glance towards the barren walls, the soft light that pools in through the slats in the window, anything but the specimen in his bed. “I had a dream."

“About?” Ferdinand asks, and rises to his knees. He is exposed in nudity, and the beauty of his form does enough to Hubert to feel pressure upon his larynx—the gentle indentation of that navel, the smooth line to his proud hips, the dip where they meet the solid muscle of thigh, every curve of that pretty, sensitive cock. Hubert rubs at his throat now, ignoring the pangs through his wrist as his fingers stretch beyond comfort.

“About the past.”

“If you wish to talk about it, I can make us tea.”

“That isn’t necessary."

Ferdinand stands in the exhale of bedsheets; he sets his feet flat upon the floor nude to Hubert’s clothed, saturated to Hubert’s monochrome. Each part of him functional. Every piece of him uncorrupt.

They stand there together, and Hubert feels every part a gnarled reflection.

A moment of fragile breaths. Ferdinand looks at Hubert. Hubert looks away.

Ferdinand touches him first, because Ferdinand has always been bold; braver than Hubert, _kinder_ than Hubert, always the one to make the first move. Had he not done the same in those flowery gardens in Garreg Mach, had their fingers not brushed indiscriminately enough for Hubert to glance up, shocked, and to find himself lit by Ferdinand’s adoring smile? Oh, to return to those days, before Hubert’s work with Reason and the compression of wartime had turned his hands fickle and useless, when the war was nothing more than a secret shared between he and Edelgard, a powerful, frightening secret brought up only in the deadest nights.

Ferdinand’s fingers card through Hubert’s hair, and Hubert remains still. He will not have it, not this sympathy. That Ferdinand insists on treating him like something fragile is a particularly grating irritant upon Hubert’s patience. That Ferdinand touch him as though he is something ambrosial, more so. And so he straightens; his fingers lace behind his back in some pangs of hurt.

“My darling. The sun is hardly up. It’s _frigid,_ ” Ferdinand says, and Hubert swallows. “Won’t you come back to bed for another hour?”

There is a war to be won and a failing world to right and still every morning, Ferdinand bids him stay.

Hubert grants his lover half of his bidden time, broken fingers trailing reverent lines down the muscular expanse of shoulder as Ferdinand’s arms wrap tight about his middle. He breathes in the scent of Ferdinand’s sunshine hair. He watches the dustings of light swim through the window.

-

In prior visits to Linhardt’s study, Hubert hadn’t particularly felt any part an intruder. The tranquil atmosphere is one he has quite come to enjoy, and barring the time just around battles, the peace remains predominately unbothered. When Hubert visits, it is to find Linhardt asleep or working compulsively, and when he stays, it is to not be bothered by any unnecessary commentary. Linhardt feels no devotion to useless conversation, and Hubert certainly does not enjoy the craft beyond the ways in which he can manipulate it for himself.

However, it feels different when he is the subject of the scholar’s keen interest, arms outstretched and blistered palms upturned onto the table. Linhardt leans over the charred flesh. The feather of his quill traces a line down the middle finger.

Hubert considers offering the man _just_ that finger, if he is so intent upon it, though he keeps the thought safe behind an enclosure of teeth. His shame has no cause here. No reason. Linhardt approaches Hubert’s case with discerning eyes and menial concern, and Hubert resigns in playing the part of specimen for whatever deranged tests he will be subject. Linhardt is a divine healer in the precious moments he spends away from the addictive nothingness of slumber. And Hubert, loathe as he is to admit it, longs to be _fixed_.

And so he had devoured his pride that morning, looking directly in Linhardt’s eyes and requesting his assistance.

“I’ve never seen Reason affect any limb quite so strongly,” Linhardt murmurs now, encouraging Hubert’s palm to flip so that it lays flat upon the table instead. Now, they are greeted with Hubert’s knuckles, gnarled, jagged, ruinous. “You said you were trying an incantation of your own?”

“Quite clearly,” Hubert remarks, cool. Linhardt hums an affirmation.

“And that you began to notice the ruin—?”

“Some months ago. It began at my fingertips and crept upward.” Hubert swallows; his tongue wets his lips. "The ache came next. When I foolishly attempt white magics. When it storms.” _Irritation_. He can feel his own eyes flash. “And if I cared to sit around and repeat myself all day I’d have become a schoolmarm and not a Minister, if you _don’t_ mind."

“Irritability. Perhaps from the ache,” Linhardt drawls, adjusting his spectacles and narrowing his eyes until lashes like tall grass brush the thick panes. “I detect no odor or spread of discoloration beyond the magical vessels. You’ve brought me an interesting case, certainly. I would say—“ he pauses to click his tongue in a way that makes Hubert want to smash something “—it argues a magical virus to the instrument itself with no physical side effects.”

“Barring the pain,” Hubert comments, sharp. “The decreased mobility.”

“All contained within the vessels you use to cast the spells. The pathways for magic down your limb.” Linhardt’s gaze sweeps Hubert’s for a moment, unwavering in the face of the latter's sharpness. “What, would you prefer your body to decay alongside it? What an incessant burden you’d be then, mm?”

“I am not a burden. My magic comes fine. Better, perhaps.” Hubert’s teeth click. “It is everything else that causes me issue.”

Hubert's shame curdles in his throat; his shoulders are heavy. It still undoes him to see his hands spread out in front of him, broken and useless like this. A mercy that they can still summon magic just as well on the battlefield. Were he rendered completely useless—no, he doesn’t want to think about what he might do were he rendered _useless_.

But his writing is the repulsive chicken-scratch of a child. His ability to be a lover, diminished tenfold. Hubert does not waste his time on loathing very often. But for himself, he will make an exception. He looks at his useless fingers and hates them into oblivion. He longs for his bleach-white gloves that mask their ruin.

So Hubert tightens his jaw and says nothing further. Rather, he watches the clouds thicken outside the window to Linhardt’s study. He breathes in slowly until his nose is full of the odor of parchment and reads the golden inscriptions on book covers, not trusting his tongue capable of any further niceties that day—if it is, they will not be wasted on the likes of Linhardt.

It is another exhaustive hour before Linhardt removes his spectacles and pronounces Hubert beyond salvation of current-day medicine; hardly a breath longer before Hubert decides to vacate the premises before he tear off the head of Enbarr’s famed scholar. He pauses only to tug on his gloves at the door.

-

They work long into dead night, the hearth warmed with the fire that has burned to embers and eyes straining against the low lights. They work diligently, and Hubert allows all worthless thoughts leave; he focuses on the steady stroke of his pen, the unshapely letters that are growing stronger as he relearns how to script. 

It is ugly; amorphous. But for the work he does alongside Edelgard, his child’s writing will do, for, as amateur as it may appear on paper, his word is respected. His assistance with her policy; his combat tactics. Tonight, they scour healthcare bills in search of precedent. If they do not find it, they will merely make their own. Together, they burn a path through the undergrowth of antiquated law.

The clock upon the wall indicates some time beyond midnight when Edelgard’s fingers find his elbow and press just so. Hubert looks up to lilac eyes full of concern.

“My Lady?”

“Are you not tired, Hubert?”

_And to what importance if he is?_ “It would not do to abandon you so early. You would be up until dawn.” He knows this because he has come in to find her asleep at her desk mornings after the odd nights her convincing works; those mornings, he has drawn his own cloak gently around her shoulders and gone to fetch tea.

“Hubert.” There is something meaningful swimming in her eyes, although Hubert cannot differentiate it through the tireless determination he has grown so accustomed to seeing therein as of late. “The difference between us is that my bed is empty, and yours warmed by somebody you love. It would be an opportunity sorely missed to leave him there, waiting, alone."

His spine straightens. “I see Ferdinand talked to you.”

“We talk quite often. He is one of my most vocal advisors, after all.”

Perhaps on a happier day Hubert would have grinned back at her.

“What is it you want of me?” He asks instead, fingers curling, awkward and painful, into a fist beside the parchments ruddied with his childlike scribblings. 

“Frankly, I would be prefer if you just weren’t so damned stubborn.”

As Hubert would prefer to touch his lover the way he is meant to be handled. As he might prefer a day without pain; without this storm of inadequacy, without lamenting the way he cannot take Ferdinand’s face into his hands, stroke his muscled arms and the ridge of his belly, palm the front of his pants in the way that pulls those pretty little noises to those plump lips and darkens that amber gaze.

He thinks of Ferdinand, golden and sunshine-warmed and waiting in Hubert’s bed. He thinks of the air they christened with whispered vows of dedication and the reverent ways Hubert had used to touch him.

Hubert swallows back acrid remorse like bile.

-

Heavy tomes splattered with a deep maroon substance pile high on a scrubbed wooden desk; Hubert’s gloves lay beside a perished candle, empty, wilted little things. His fingers flex as he speaks the drawling tongue of incantation. Reason crackles and breaks in between his palms.

His shirt hangs open, exposing a deathly pale chest and hinting at sinewy muscles before it tucks into his belt. His onyx hair is limp over an eye from the ugly toying habit Hubert developed some time ago, perhaps in his academy days when he balanced school with the imminent war he and Edelgard brewed in private. A black cluster of static gathers inside his wrist. His _Medusa_ , perfected, honed so that it can target an enemy tens of meters away. Archery for a sorcerer, he had so described it to Edelgard. Mobility and reach, previously unobtainable, packed away neatly in a roaring blast of Reason.

His Medusa flashes and perishes in the acrid smell of fumes, and so he tries it again with a grunted effort. She is called to his hands and finally, Hubert sees his worth.

For this reason, his long nights spent in the dismal confines of his safety-proofed room to practice such experimentation. For this reason, the dead, useless things at the ends of his wrists.

The spell heats and bursts and rebounds off the grimy stone walls. It blasts Hubert full in the chest.

-

He awakens to gentle cooing and fingers on his face, and for an instant Hubert leans into them, insistent, as though he is some child seeking comfort from its parent, as though he is not too old, too grown, too weary of the world to perform an act so innocent. Hubert opens bleary eyes to find Ferdinand just out of focus. That distinctive apricot mane of curls.

“How many times must I tell you?” Ferdinand asks, worry stitched into the back of his throat. “Your experimental magics are to be performed with a healer at the ready, and _not_ in confinement."

Hubert raises a useless hand. It brushes along Ferdinand’s jaw. “At least one time more.”

“ _Hubert,_ ” Ferdinand objects, voice rising dangerously, though he says nothing further. Rather, he eases Hubert until the latter is seated upright upon his wooden seat. As he is righted, Hubert can feel the trembling of Ferdinand’s fingers.

_How much longer must this go on?_ Ferdinand had asked him the last time, and for a moment—a blissful, fleeting moment between Hubert’s inhale and his memory of the war and Edelgard and the commitments he has tied to himself like wire to his organs intent on tearing him apart, he had wanted to assure Ferdinand it would be the last. That he would not pursue further ruin for the sake of longevity not guaranteed.

But he had not, and he had gone and done it again. And here he is, plagued and broken and full of shame and victory all at once.

Ferdinand’s concern-creased face wavers above him, and Hubert reaches out further, more insistently, so that he might _feel_. The love that he sees etched upon those sculpted features seems reserved exclusively for him—and for Ferdinand’s favorite tea, and for his pretty chestnut mare who rides fast and true that Ferdinand has named after some ancient Goddess, because of course he has, and Ferdinand’s favorite tea cakes that taste of almond and cinnamon and crunch just enough. And Hubert wants to ask him if it is not _shameful_ to be in love with a man who cannot so much as hold his own spoon.

And yet. As angry as Ferdinand is, he too cannot resist pressing into those blistered, ruined hands. Ferdinand seeks comfort in limbs that have previously given nothing but torment. And somehow, he looks as though he has found it.

Hubert feels his heart shatter. A wet mist of feeling coats his eyes.

There is the success of his work. There are the roaring aftereffects of powerful Reason that make him feel more alive than he has been in twenty-five years. But that look of Ferdinand’s has hope, tender and fledgling, hatching just behind his sternum. There is a moment in which he cannot breathe.

For many weeks now he has hidden his disgusting hands from his lover. And yet, Ferdinand turns his face into those ugly, marred palms. He kisses every fingertip.

“If you are curious, then know that _I did it,_ ” Hubert says softly, and straightens his spine. “I performed it without fault, I cast the spell, and once the incantation is validated and documented it will be passed to the soldiers, and Ferdinand, we will be such a force—“

“A force,” Ferdinand repeats, and smiles, wan. “My darling. I knew you could do it. How exquisite.”

“As I have.” His head falls back onto his shoulders; the pain that wracks him is ebbing as rapidly as it has come, and what remains is contentment swirling in a greater vat of exhaustion. And still, Hubert’s eyes focus on Ferdinand’s figure above him. “As are you. Though if you are here to take me to bed, I must insist that you cease your efforts here and now—I am not some imprudent maiden who must be fetched.”

“Hubert,” Ferdinand whispers, and laughs. “Had I the power to take you to bed, I’d never allow you leave it, not even once."

He is strong—but not enough to carry the heft of Hubert’s body. And so they support one another though the darkened hallways of Enbarr’s late-night palace. Static rises from Hubert’s hands, and lifts Ferdinand’s hair, eery. Hubert tangles his black, useless fingertips around a curl and watches in interest as Ferdinand’s gentle face reddens.

He brushes his thumb along the hot rear of Ferdinand’s neck, and perhaps it is enough.

-

Perhaps it is enough.

Ferdinand lays Hubert down and kisses him silly, and by the time they break away to gasp for breath, the buttons of his suit have already been undone, his middle exposed to the bite of the cooling autumn air, chest flushed and heaving.

Perhaps it is enough.

They connect again with the ferocious clashing of teeth and tongue, and Hubert lifts his hips as well as he can so that Ferdinand can cast away his bottoms; he longs to have Ferdinand close, and his forearms do that job for him as well as they can—they drag Ferdinand forward until their bodies are tangled upon the cool, enticing spread of bedsheets and he does not stop in their quest for proximity until Ferdinand is gasping and Hubert's own lungs are on fire and his heart is on fire and his world is turned the apricot of Ferdinand’s curls.

A grunt of effort rolls them over, and Ferdinand fumbles with his own pants with trembling hands and Hubert adjusts his elbows to bear the burden of his weight. And when he enters Ferdinand, they pull hungry inhales from the same air.

Hubert’s sharp glare, into the fractured hunger of Ferdinand’s. For how long now has Hubert stared in the mirror and thought himself crippled, useless? And yet. He can still render Ferdinand’s body quivering and wracked with need with every adjustment of his hips. And how Hubert is seized by it; the power. His mouth presses, open and hot, to the jaw of his love.

“Hubert,” Ferdinand begs, and Hubert’s eyes are wild and his mouth is empty and he paints hot patterns along the flesh of Ferdinand’s neck and all he tastes is his own hunger and Goddess, sometimes he takes his own face in his ruined fingertips and wonders if all he knows is how to _yearn_.

“ _ Darling _ ,” he returns when his mouth is free, and perhaps it’s as much an apology as he needs give.

Ferdinand is everywhere at once, along the blade of Hubert’s spine and in his oil slick hair and between the line of his rear and all around Hubert’s cock and Hubert’s broken hands make for a pillow upon which his love can toss his pretty head and keen.

Their release comes all at once, a blinding, pounding crescendo. Hubert’s sweat drips onto Ferdinand’s face, and perhaps it is enough.

-

The day dawns, and it is golden; gold in the sunshine that streams through the slats of the room’s guarded window, gold in the sugar spun hairs down Ferdinand’s chest, gold in the buttons Ferdinand does up against Hubert’s chest as they dress, as Hubert looks anywhere but Ferdinand’s careful fingers, as Ferdinand is efficient and chattering all the while as he straightens the fine dark jacket.

Hubert lingers on the hearth, and it is three steps into the hallway beyond before Ferdinand realizes. He turns back with such a look of confusion, Hubert cannot resist but wipe it off of his face. Their noses brush as he leans in carefully; their lips connect just so. Hubert can hear Ferdinand’s stuttering breaths.

Foolish creature, willowy and smitten, Hubert thinks with a pang in his chest and a laugh contained behind an enclosure of teeth. He pulls away, and Ferdinand  _ gleams _ .

The hallways of Enbarr’s keep are made golden with beams of early morning sunlight; they paint Hubert’s shining boots as he disturbs every one en route to the war chambers for another long day. His hands curl, careful and proper, behind his back.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Twitter!](https://www.twitter.com/iliawrites)


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